Reading is a learned behavior which begins at an early age. Reading is taught in schools as a social requirement for becoming educated and fully participating in our society. Reading is not a genetic trait. Reading is a learned activity typically requiring the coordinated use of a reader's eyes and a series of disparate cognitive activities. Through coordinated trial and error experiences a person learns to read the written word. In this learned behavior, a person develops a path of integrated brain functions cumulatively designated as the reading brain. Reading and these associated information gathering strategies for acquiring knowledge are generally divided into two types of reading. The solitary, contemplative and immersive experience of reading books and other documents is “deep reading”.
The public's escalated use of Internet driven communications has been combined with a perusal model of reading words. This new interrupt driven and dominant method for acquiring language on the Internet is effectively re-training the neural processing of the reading brain to linguistically process language differently. This skimming model of reading is “shallow reading.” Technology has made possible and effectively promotes this new type of shallow reading pattern.
Society's constant and growing use of the Internet to send and read our text language communications is combining with the neuroplasticity of the reading brain to effectively re-wire our neuron processing of words into a new perusal method for understanding written language. There are many negative implications for the wholesale adoption of this new reading/learning style of information gathering. In this new shallow pattern of gathering information the relationship between the brain's working memory and the permanent storage of long term memory is being detrimentally modified.
Prior efforts for publishing written language have been through developing document publishing languages like SGML (Standardized Graphic Markup Language). Two subsets of SGML are XML and HTML and these markup dialects have been used on the Internet to construct web pages for reading documents. SGML digital documents have been used by publishers to efficiently print traditional bound documents like books, magazines, scientific articles, etc. These efforts are largely focused on printing documents faster and cheaper.
Some publishers have manufactured computer screen devices built to be used with SGML pages to read without paper (eReaders). Delivering these documents digitally to these devices offers the reader a wider choice of aesthetic font and point size improvements while also controlling screen contrast, background and foreground color choices, and other limited display options. These electronic ink solutions and digital book readers have made acquiring and displaying traditional page oriented book design more convenient for the reader. These eBook readers have been virtualized into software and offer a reading solution on phones, tablets, and personal computers.
One advantage over print based books offered in the eReader solution is the use of a cloud based Internet solution. These connected devices store the reader's activities in the “cloud” and makes it possible to coordinate multiple connected reading devices. Start a book on your personal computer at work and continue reading later at the doctor's office on your phone while waiting for your appointment. The current page in the reading experience is shared from the personal computer to the phone and conveniently the reader's place in reading the book is maintained on multiple devices.
However, these electronic reading software solutions (eReaders) have continued the place based architecture of the displayed page. The same perceptual constraints on language and sentence structure are maintained in these solutions. The original mechanical constraints originating in the printing press are re-created digitally in these formatted pages. The cognitive reading brain activities of using a software reader application remain remarkable unchanged from reading a printed document. The person reading the digital book has the same perceptual experience and must labor with the same methods of saccadic eye movements to identify and decipher the words.
A separate software reading technology solution offered by several software providers is based upon a 1950's development strategy of Tachistoscope Reading Devices. This method, called rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) depends on a word being placed on a display screen momentarily before the next word is presented, and so forth. In this method the reading brain is presented one word after the other without the need to move the eyes and find the next word in the sentence. The RSVP technology is intended to boost word per minute reading skills by reducing the labor associated with finding words in a sentence. RSVP does not address the root perceptual enjoyment issue of reading. Word presentation remains place based.
The real challenge in discovering a solution to the decline of immersive deep reading is finding a perceptual experience on par with other competing visual technologies. Media competition is fierce to gain access to a slice of a person's time and deep reading is losing the battle. The continued decline of deep reading in America continues at an alarming rate. Negative economic and intellectual repercussions accrue to an American that no longer deep reads.
The current placement rules for written language and the mechanically constrained patterns of reading used today are hundreds of years old. Today's current presentation of written language is place based and operates under a careful set of placement formatting rules. Text is typeset into words. Words are arranged into sentences. Sentences are horizontally placed in lines which flow over to following lines once the maximum line length has been reached. Rules exist for breaking up words and sentences if the word or sentence is longer than fits a normal horizontal line.
Reading starts with the eyes labor intensively scanning letters, forming words, evaluating and comprehending words. Ultimately the reader processes a completed sentence for meaning. All the perceptual relationships in this Cartesian system of written language are place based: one letter follows the next letter, et cetera. Each new line of text serially begins where the previous line left off. All the letters strung together, separated by word separators and knit together with semantic rules and punctuation marks constitute the original text information. These rules used for printing and/or displaying written language are place based and organized for the reader's eyes to search out and individually discover the meaning conveyed by the language.
Currently this perceptual system organizing written language is two dimensional and driven by the reader's eye movements. The duration of any word depends upon how quickly the eye can see the word, comprehend the word, and understand the word in the context of the larger sentence while moving on to the next word. In the current written language system of reading it is up to the reader's eyes to process the written language on its own perceptual terms. In this mechanically constrained system of language presentation all words are created equal. There are only minor visual area size differences between all the three letter words found in a book. For example, the words “god”, “dog”, “red”, and “but” are all traditionally treated with the same display rules regardless of their syntactic value and or their differences semantically. In a place based system all written words are printed the same.